I met Richard Dawkins this morning, whilst taking part in the BBC's Big Questions TV programme. (I was on to talk about blasphemy, and it is worth noting that during it another guest, George Carey the former archbishop of Canterbury, called for the blasphemy laws to be repealed.

Dawkins was charming and rational, distinctly unlike the intolerant polemicist I felt I encountered in The God Delusion. The apparent disparity led me to suspect that he lets his written rhetoric run away with him. Perhaps he is not alone in that, as a polemicist. But take the issue of children being raised in a religious faith. In the book, Dawkins implies this is worse than child abuse which is about as strong as you can get. This morning, though, he argued that all he was complaining about was children being labeled Christian or Muslim, in the same way that you might be worried if a child was labeled Marxist or Humanist (he did himself make the last comparison!).

I'm not sure that children are ever labeled Christian, as opposed, say, to being raised in a Christian family. And indeed, two of the younger contributors to the programme explained how being raised in religious families actually taught them to question their faith. But I came away with the distinct feeling that in front of that mixed audience at least, Dawkins really thinks that child abuse is a greater crime. It was perhaps cathartic to write what he did, but isn't really defensible in public.

Whilst on the subject of militant atheists: by now, we have become used to them misrepresenting - presumably willfully - what it might be to have religious belief. It saddens me because it will only serve to perpetuate the diminishment of the debate about religion, and thus the risks of extremism. To individuals like AC Grayling polemical distortion appears to have become second nature (see here for a recent example). In fact, Grayling has adopted another tactic, that of claiming the ancient philosophical tradition as his/the atheist's own, on the basis that it was supposedly religion-free: ethics in antiquity was a purely philosophical matter, or some such, he often writes.

I am genuinely baffled by this (all comments gratefully received!). Even the pretty stridently atheistic Simon Blackburn in his Plato's Republic considers the religious interpretation of myths like that of the Cave. And any Plato scholar, which Blackburn admits he isn't, would tell you that Plato was religious in the sense of being an idealist who sought the transcendent in something akin to a beatific vision. He arguably thought of Socrates as a religious figure: in the Symposium Socrates is identified with the daimon Eros, a go-between to the gods.

Iris Murdoch explained what this means for his approach to ethics. It was primarily intuitive: it involved rational argument but not fundamentally so as to decide what to do but as a kind of spiritual exercise so that the individual might be awakened to, and orientated towards the good, that would draw them body, mind and spirit. To put it another way, the basic ethical question for Plato was what do you love? This is not the only way to think about ethics, of course. But as Murdoch says, conceived in this way, there is a deep affinity between religious feeling and ethical behaviour.